1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, apparatus, and computer program product for testing a virtualised storage system in response to disk exercising commands.
2. Background
Virtualised storage systems are commonly used in computer systems and are provided by a virtualisation management system. The virtualisation management system is arranged to present a set of physical storage resources as a single logical storage resource or disk. Different types of physical storage elements may make up a virtualised storage system and may be distributed over a network.
Once a virtualisation management system has created a virtual disk, file system benchmarking or disk exercising software tools may be used to test the virtual disk before it is made available for use. Such systems are used to perform selected sets of tests on the virtual disk to determine whether its performance and data consistency are within predetermined limits. A common test for virtual disks is to perform Input/Output (I/O) requests to each element of the virtual disk to test whether all elements are available and functioning acceptably. However, a problem arises when the size of the virtual disk or disks is larger than the amount of physical storage available to the virtualised storage system because disk exercising software tools are written to perform I/O requests to the whole of the virtual disk. A further problem arises when the virtual disk is large because performing such I/O request for the virtual disk consumes large amounts of processing resource over a significant time.